Interview with Taking Back Sunday: Call Them What You Want

Long Island’s Taking Back Sunday have been trekking through the music industry for nearly eight years, releasing their latest album, the raucous Louder Now, in April 2006. After months of touring on the record, the fivesome has jumped on this year’s Projekt Revolution tour alongside My Chemical Romance, Placebo, HIM, Saosin and more. Singer Adam Lazzara discusses the group’s recent experience playing Live Earth in Jersey, their future plans and just how hard it is to swing that microphone around.

How was your experience playing Live Earth?

Oh man, it was great. Just to get to be a part of that meant a lot to us as a band because that’s an issue that’s very important to us. Fred, our guitar player, is who really brought it to the band after he saw An Inconvenient Truth; he really started to educate himself more about it and educate us. On our last tour we ended up in Oklahoma and we were double booked with Al Gore at this venue. During the day he did a live presentation of An Inconvenient Truth and that night we played a show there so it almost came around full circle. We’ve been trying to make our band and our personal lives as green as possible.

Did you meet Al Gore?

Yeah we all sat down as band to watch him. Afterwards, pretty much everyone on the tour got to meet him real quick. He has a very firm handshake, that Al Gore.

Do you think something like Live Earth has the power to generate awareness for this issue?

Well that’s everybody’s hope. It happened all over the world so you can only hope it would educate people a little more and maybe change their lives to help curb what’s going on with the climate.

How does your band bridge that gap between creating social awareness and being entertainment?

We always try not to be preachy. Nobody wants to hear someone stand up and preach. So for us, we try to have information readily available for people if they want to know more about it—links on our website to information—and we’re always willing to talk about it if people ask us.

Do Taking Back Sunday have any other issues they are currently championing?

Of course there’s other things that are important to us, but this seems like the most urgent right now. That’s why we are staying focused on it for a while.

Are you going to invest in one of those bio-diesel tour buses?

On our last tour we had a regular bus, but we bought carbon off-set just to negate the emissions that we let out. Hopefully on Projekt Revolution we’ll get a bio-diesel bus, but it’s hard because there’s not very many of them readily available. Hopefully in the next few years it will become more of the norm for bands to be touring on those buses because it’s just so harmful to be touring in regular buses.

What can people expect from Projekt Revolution?

It’s just going to be an awesome tour. The lineup seems to me like something that hasn’t been done before. It’s juts a great bill. Any concert memories I have always take place in the summer so I hope we can create some of those memories for other people.

So you’re not sad you’re not on Warped Tour?

No, not at all. Nothing against Warped Tour, but we’ve done that, and it feels good for us to have the opportunity to do something new and broaden our audience. There’s going to be people at these Projekt Revolution shows that would probably never find themselves at a Taking Back Sunday show. I’m hoping it will open people’s minds a little bit that there doesn’t have to be lines drawn in the different genres of rock-n-roll.